Saturday, December 01, 2012

UK Road Accidents on Google Maps

The UK Road Accidents Map is a Google Map that shows the location of all the reported road accidents that occurred in the country during 2011.

The map uses official data from the UK government's Road Safety Accident dataset. That is a lot of data! If you look at the number of markers in the screenshot above and extrapolate that for the whole of the UK then you can imagine how much data is being displayed on the map.

To handle so much data the map divides the country into regions using selectable polygons and then loads the requested data for the region selected. A marker clustering system is also used which allows the user to zoom in on the map to see the individual markers.

The map can be searched by address and postcode and the data itself can be explored via a large number of criteria. Using the filters below the map it is possible to refine that data by the severity of accident, by the vehicles involved and by age range, sex, speed limit and weather conditions.